


T Plus Twenty

by Unadulterated



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 04:28:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2837972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unadulterated/pseuds/Unadulterated
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just because she wants to claw it out of her skin doesn’t mean the clock is wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	T Plus Twenty

**Author's Note:**

> Posted originally on [tumblr.](http://miniongrin.tumblr.com/post/105964730225/t-plus-twenty)
> 
> Basically because I thought, what about those few sad souls who aren't so sure they _want_ a soulmate? And then I decided Natasha would be one of them.

Natalia Alianova Romanova is a lot of things, but one of the things she’s done her best _not_ to be is an idiot.

So she knows that they know the clock on her wrist. The day it will happen, the day they should keep watch to gain their greatest weapon over her. And maybe, back when the clock still reads almost nine years into the future, she believes that this is what should be.

By the time the clock is counting down to days she’s been on the run for months, and now she’s slowly but surely being backed into a corner. Just because she can see it happening doesn’t mean she can stop it; it’s the same inevitability of the slow, backwards count of the numbers on her wrist.

Just because she wants to claw it out of her skin doesn’t mean the clock is wrong.

 

—§§§—

 

She tells herself she’ll be alone, when the clock runs out, or she’ll be looking into the barrel of her own gun because needing anyone was never really on the program and a soulmate is the last thing a monster like her would want (or deserve, that treacherous voice in her head whispers).

So Natalia calls in favors, buries herself deep in anonymity and they’re backing her into a corner but it’s a corner she’ll curl into alone. The clock is ticking down and she’s gritting her teeth against it, grinding them down every second closer the moment tick. There’s mere weeks, then days, then hours. T minus twenty days. T minus twenty hours.

T minus twenty minutes.

She’s used to being hunted, and the men with guns don’t scare her. It’s the other hunter, the first hunter, the one she can never lose.

The clock is ticking in her head, now, she doesn’t have to look, and she’s staring out a window too close to zero for her own comfort—what if she seems them out there, walking the streets, and knows that they’re never going to know her or if they ever do, they’ll live just long enough to regret every second that they waited?

T minus twenty seconds, counting, counting down and down and—

And so she turns.

The clock hits zero and maybe it’s just the way her brain _knows_ it’s time, maybe it’s just the way her breathing’s been growing heavier, but it resonates through her body and by the time her vision makes sense again, she’s staring down the shaft of an arrow.

That’s why the tears slip down her face, that’s why she raises her gun and raises it to point at her soulmate.

The moment lasts forever, but the clock is already counting again, a slender negative next to the numbers on her wrist. The numbers never stop, not unless your soulmate dies, and it could be years and she’ll be able to count back to the second she met this man, so long as they’re both still breathing. Time crawls, and Natalia’s brain recognizes T plus twenty seconds.

“You’re not afraid to die, are you?” the man says, almost thoughtfully.

Should she be?

Natalia smiles, because somehow that makes sense, somehow that settles, knowing that her soulmate will be the one to deliver her to rest.

She genuinely hopes he’ll like the numbers frozen on his wrist.

 

—§§§—

 

But that’s not how this story ends, and at T plus Twenty days, she’s finally let out of SHIELD’s holdings and into the waiting arms of a new handler in a new life.

Her soulmate doesn’t mention to anyone what they are, and neither does she.

Natalia becomes Natasha, Romanova becomes Romanov, Alianova no longer exists. They don’t look at her wrist, they don’t ask about her soulmate, and in a way that scares her, because if they don’t feel the need to use that then it only means they have better ways, deeper ways of crawling inside her and pulling their trigger with her finger.

It’s a long time before Natasha realizes that she can take her finger off the trigger, if she so chooses, and that’s the entire reason she’s even alive. She leaves it on the trigger, anyway, because she’s paranoid and if she doesn’t need something she likes to shoot first, figure out what they _would_ have done to hurt her if she’s let them much, much later.

She doesn’t understand the flow of secrets in these walls. There’s order, levels of confidentiality, and then there’s what she might tentatively call friendship, if she truly believed anything of the sort existed.

Natasha meets Phil Coulson and slowly, hesitantly learns to trust him. She gets to know Clint Barton as something other than the man she saw when the numbers on her wrist ran out.

But it’s like he doesn’t know, or more likely, as though he doesn’t want her. His wrist, where his clock should be, is covered up by the leather guard from his bowstring. His numbers would be just a few seconds ahead of hers, because he saw her before she saw him.

She doesn’t understand why she wants to know _how many seconds_ earlier, and it scares her.

 

—§§§—

 

T plus twenty weeks, they’re sitting in the jet on the way back from a mission. Clint—he’s just Clint now, and once in a while he’ll call her Tasha instead of Natasha—rubs his wrist with a grimace.

He notices her eyes and offers up a half-hearted shrug. “The scars hurt when it gets real cold out.”

Natasha stares at him; “Scars?”

Clint looks a little surprised. “I haven’t—yeah, scars.” He unbuckles the guard over his wrist and presents his wrist to her: scar tissue with black pigment frozen inside, across where his clock should be. “My dad wasn’t real… _happy_ that his own clock stopped.” There’s tension in Clint’s shoulders as he shrugs and looks down. “But I mean, that was his own— _holy shit_.”

Coulson looks up from across the jet. “Problem, Barton?”

“It’s negative!” Clint exclaims. “It’s—oh God, I _met_ them, and I don’t know _when_ , oh my god I hate my life.” Clint groans and slumps back in his seat, as far as the harness will let him. “What if I shot ‘em? That would be some poetic, miserable crap. They might have not even _had_ a clock, if they were never going to see me. Oh my god.” He groans again and buries his face in his hands.

Natasha has recovered enough to hope like hell that Clint has been absorbing Coulson’s attention and her voice is remarkably steady when she says, “When’s the last time you looked at it?”

“I don’t know!” Clint complains, voice muffled by his own hands. “It could have been _years_ ago. I didn’t know I was going to be able to see the negative—everything else is scarred, I figured it just stopped.”

“It doesn’t stop until your soulmate dies,” Natasha says, blankly, and she’s stating the obvious but _he doesn’t know_.

And maybe that makes her want to laugh.

“But now I’m never going to know if it stops,” Clint sighs. “I could have already shot ’em.” He slumps backward again and throws a hand over his eyes. “ _Ugh_.”

Natasha is very careful not to turn her wrist over, because the side of her wrist is showing and they’ll be able to see that the number is growing, that she’s met them, but as long as she doesn’t move maybe they won’t be suspicious. Maybe they won’t find out just yet.

And maybe that makes her want to cry.

 

—§§§—

 

At T plus twenty months, she shows him her wrist.

“You’ve met them already,” Clint says, almost surprised, and he doesn’t touch but his eyes take everything in. “Now, I’m shit at math, how long ago was that?”

“Twenty months,” she says simply.

Clint still doesn’t quite get it, and Natasha has just started to worry that she’s going to have to say it outright, _you’re my soulmate_ , when he says, “How’d you meet them?”

“He pointed an arrow at my face.”

Clint does his sniper freeze, so it’s only his gaze that jerks up to stare at her, his eyes wide. “He—wait, _what_?”

A hundred words hang in the air, _why didn’t you tell me_ , and _is this a lie_ , but the doubts in Clint’s eyes are gone in mere seconds because they don’t lie to each other anymore. He’s waiting for whatever her next words are, because he’ll take those and trust them in a way Natasha doesn’t believe anyone’s trusted her before. Maybe that’s what a soulmate is; the person who does for you what no one else can.

“I was scared,” she says simply.

He looks at her, and he doesn’t say _you didn’t have to be_ or _please don’t be afraid anymore,_ he simply says, “I bet,” and that’s the moment Natasha realizes how and why she loves him.

That’s the moment she realizes she loves him.

“I wonder how high that number goes,” he says thoughtfully, and Natasha entwines her fingers with his, turning her wrist over so neither of them can see it anymore. It isn’t that important, really; it’s not the numbers that are love, it’s them.

But the promise of the numbers is its own kind of beauty. “Why don’t we try and find out?” she says, knowing he’ll always fight for her, even if his weren’t the numbers on her wrist.

Knowing she’ll always fight for him, too.


End file.
